Keeping Friends Difficult For Teen

March 30, 1988|By Marguerite Kelly

QUESTION: I don't know where to turn for advice to help my daughter.

She is 13 and she can't make and keep friends. Her friendships last for a while, sometimes as long as a year, sometimes less, but the friends always end up ignoring, abandoning or disliking her. Even when she has friends, she is usually left on the outskirts of the conversation.

She is outwardly fine most of the time and seems to me to be a happy person, but some nights she cries herself to sleep and it breaks my heart. She can't understand why people dislike her, why she doesn't have a best friend (and everyone else seems to), why she is left out.

This has been going on for years. She has two parents who love her and a younger sibling. We have enough money to give her what she needs and wants within reason. She is pretty, not overweight, talented and very bright. We encourage her to have friends visit, to have parties, to be involved in activities. She is a good-hearted person and seems to care about other people. I have suggested that perhaps she might want to discuss her problems with someone who might be able to help her, but she is violently opposed. She says she isn't ''sick'' and doesn't need a psychiatrist.

ANSWER: Popularity is always important to children, who never realize how many other children are lonely too, especially in the early teens. Friendships change and cliques often break apart and rebuild, the way they did in the third grade.

Your daughter's situation is so difficult because it's a cyclical problem. The lonelier she gets, the more she wants friends, which would make her need for their approval quite obvious. This, in turn, would make them back away, because people don't like to feel that others must depend on them.

There could be other factors.

Your daughter may not fit into the mainstream because she isn't interested enough in small talk to know how to make it -- and there's nothing most 13- year-olds make more. Or she may have trouble making friends because it matters so much to her parents. If she feels pushed to develop deep friendships before she's ready for them or because it's your goal instead of hers, she'll do it badly.

You can help her most by being more casual about her problem and by helping her realize that people who pursue interests are the ones who make friends because a common interest is the basis of all lasting friendships. She might like a weekend club for skiers or spelunkers, the chess club at school or a museum course for teen-agers.

You might also gently encourage her to get a job, because work builds a child's self-confidence so well.

Thirteen may seem young for that, but your daughter is old enough to baby- sit or perhaps earn money by teaching young neighborhood children one of her own skills, like sewing or art.

Volunteer work may be easier to get and more rewarding. Your daughter could take part in a church project; help once or twice a week at a home for retarded children; work on the stage crew of a community theater or on a political campaign.

This experience will help her feel good about herself, which will give her an attractive aura of self-confidence. It also would give her the chance to meet other teen-agers.

The whole friendship issue is well discussed in The Nine Most Troublesome Teenage Problems and How to Solve Them by Lawrence Bauman, Ph.D., with Robert Riche (Lyle Stuart; $15.95). Your daughter may want to read it too, because it includes a case history of a child with her same friendship problem and how family therapy made it go away.

She needs to know that there's nothing wrong with seeing a psychologist, and plenty that's right, but you and her dad should go with her so you also can learn how to change a little bit.